"I've told my story to highlight what the problem is, and if
people don't like it, that's fine — go find somebody else," Pao
told Couric.

"But this is my story and this is something that happens to
everybody and they should think about the message and what's
happening and not try to focus on me. It's not about me."

At the end of March, Pao lost a lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins,
where she was a junior partner. She claimed Kleiner Perkins
failed to promote her based on her gender, and for firing her to
retaliate after she sued.

Now, about a week after the ruling, Pao is talking about fighting
bias in Silicon Valley. The bias isn't always obvious, Pao says.
It can feel like "death by 1,000 cuts."

"I think there should be an equal number of girls and boys
studying computers and learning about engineering and math and
doing well in it, but there's also got to be the opportunities at
the back end," she told Couric. "So we can pull in all these
girls and minorities, but if there's not that opportunity once
you get into the workforce, you're not really solving the
problem."

"You've got people
who are used to not following rules. And they don't know where
the boundaries for behavior are," Pao says, adding that this is one aspect of
Silicon Valley culture that is both good for innovation and more
detrimental for behavior in the
workplace. "And it
works for them in one aspect of their careers: they take risks,
and they build products, and people like it, and they get
rewarded for it. So, it's natural for them to bring it into other
areas as well."

Here are some other points Pao
touched on during her conversation with Couric.

How all-male events
are harmful to women. "This is what happens when you
have an all male event: women in your company feel unwelcome,
and you're forming business relationships, and you're solving
problems that you're not allowing women to be a part of," Pao
says. "Think about the
repercussions of your behavior that might not be immediately
obvious to you. It's not rules about what you can and can't do,
because I don't think people are as open to that as really
learning about things."

The
responses Pao got after the trial. "I heard from
people all over the world. I heard from men. I heard from
women. And it was very inspiring to me to know that something I
was doing was having a much bigger impact," es-he says.
"I
don't think I received any direct emails or direct contact from
people who are negative. It showed up more anonymously, as
these things often do. It didn't really bother me that much. I
stopped reading them after a while because the support was so
much more overwhelming."

How
off-hours business events affect people. "One
[way] is you're forming closer relationships. You're having
discussions about business in these different events," Pao
says. "And you may be actually resolving problems or getting
someone to say, okay, I want to do this transaction. I want to
have this project move forward. The other one is that
people then feel more comfortable in that group. So then if
it's an all male golf outing, they're all used to being with
all men, and then it becomes harder for them to integrate in a
male and female organization."

How women
are struggling in the workplace today, particularly in the tech
industry."One is the difficulty in
being taken seriously sometimes. There's often — and it happens
in every industry — the woman is assumed to be the assistant or
the junior person. Women are assumed that they aren't
technical," she says. "So they come in and you could have an
electrical engineering degree but people assume that you're not
technical and will talk to the guy who might not have that
degree but they assume he's going to be more technical. They
come in and they don't get opportunities because people bring
them to the person who was at the drinking outing the night
before with them. Or the person who's their best golf buddy. Or
the person who goes shooting with them. It's these little
things that add up. They call it the death by a thousand cuts.
You're just constantly trying to get this equal playing field,
but being taken out of it step by step."

On
implicit bias in the workplace. "I think there is implicit
bias. I think in this day and age it's becoming so written
about and talked about that it's hard to imagine that people
don't realize that they have some of it or the people around
them have some of it," she says. "There seems to be two
problems. One is that maybe the qualifications are designed in
a certain way that it doesn't allow for some of the broader
pool to participate. And the second one is that they've done
research where if you see a certain name on a resume, you're
going to be more likely to give someone with the same
qualifications an interview than someone with a different
name. So there's a bias that's
going into the process of creating these jobs and opportunities
and then there's a bias going into who's actually being
interviewed for them."

On
how women can succeed in their industries:
"You need both types of
people: The people who are willing to be that first woman in
that leadership team, and you need women who are willing to
keep pushing up in those organizations that are working. It
depends on what you want to do, and how much you love that
company, and how much you love that product. It's a really
personal decision."